Cotton was processed thousands of miles from where it was grown and was exported from a few industrial centres to the whole world. The hub of the industry was free-trading Britain, and particularly Cottonopolis itself, the city of Manchester. The peak year of the British cotton industry was 1913 when it was not only the largest, but also the most efficient cotton industry in the world.13 In the interwar years, as trade de-globalised and Japan emerged as a major competitor, Manchester’s exports slumped. In 1931, the worst year of the depression, output was half what it had been in 1913. It was not to recover very much, and from the early 1950s a long steady decline continued, though this declining industry remained important. In the 1930s it had around 30 per cent of world textiles exports, and 15 per cent in the early 1950s.

…

In the case of beef, the technologies of killing would hardly change at all from one end of the century to the next – the big changes were the introduction of the captive-bolt pistol to replace the pole-axe and the chain-saw to replace the axe.32 In the years after the Second World War, however, the vast New World slaughterhouses of the early part of the century went out of fashion, and much smaller and more dispersed operations took over. The great plants of the River Plate and Chicago closed. The old Anglo plant in Fray Bentos struggled into the 1970s, long enough to be preserved as a museum, the appropriately named Museum of the Industrial Revolution, a place which figures in tourist guides to the Southern Cone. European self-sufficiency in meat, particularly in the British case, and the rise of the Common Market, which de-globalised the trade in meat, put paid to it. In the USA the great meatpackers of Chicago lost markets to new rural, nonunionised, low-skill, single-storey meatpackers, which sent out boxed meat to supermarkets instead of sides of beef to butchers (and of course to the new giant mass producers of beefburgers and the like).
Since the 1970s, and especially the 1980s, new plants and new meatpackers, more concentrated even than those of Chicago’s prime, appeared.

…

This necessitates an account of the global technological landscape that is very different from those found implicitly and explicitly in existing global histories and histories of technology – and an account that might help revise our views about world history.
It is a measure of the importance of technology to the twentieth century, and to our understanding of it, that to rethink the history of technology is necessarily to rethink the history of the world. For example, we should no longer assume that there was ineluctable globalisation thanks to new technology; on the contrary the world went through a process of de-globalisation in which technologies of self-sufficiency and empire had a powerful role. Culture has not lagged behind technology, rather the reverse; the idea that culture has lagged behind technology is itself very old and has existed under many different technological regimes. Technology has not generally been a revolutionary force; it has been responsible for keeping things the same as much as changing them.

With their newfound clout, the rising global middle class would put pressure on dictatorships to loosen censorship, hold genuine elections, and open up new opportunities. Rising wealth would beget political freedom and democracy, which would beget greater prosperity.
Then came 2008. The years BC gave way to the years AC. After the Crisis, the expectation of a golden age gave way to a new reality. Hype for globalization yielded to mutterings about “deglobalization.” The big picture is complicated and contradictory, because not all the flows that globalization traditionally describes have slowed or reversed. The flow of information, as measured by Internet traffic, for example, is still surging. The flow of people, as measured by the number of tourists and airline passengers, is rising sharply. But overall the number of economic migrants moving from poor countries to rich ones has fallen, despite the heated controversy that broke out in 2015 over Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq.

…

Its 2012 free trade deal with the United States was the first of its kind in South America; it is part of one of the more promising new regional trade alliances along with its Andean neighbors and Mexico, and it has encouraged the transformation of Medellín from murder capital to model second city. In Africa, Morocco and Rwanda are carving out export success stories in very rough neighborhoods.
Location still matters. Economic growth has long tended to flower along the trade routes that carry manufactured goods; now it is flourishing in service industry capitals as well, and this trend may be gaining momentum in a period of deglobalization. In recent years, as growth in global trade leveled off and global capital flows have fallen sharply, the process of globalization nonetheless has accelerated in two important categories. The number of international travelers and tourists has continued to rise rapidly, and Internet communications have continued to explode, which could open up new opportunities for countries that can exploit these trends.

We have seen in Essay II that these simple predictions were found quite wrong when it came to explaining the growth of the world during Globalization 2.0. This fact is by now generally acknowledged, and alternative theories of economic growth have been proposed to account for it. It is also accepted that since the Industrial Revolution, the average incomes of the countries of the world have diverged (see Vignette 2.1). But what has happened during the period of deglobalization when, if the theory is correct, we should observe an increase in the differences between poor and rich countries?
The period of deglobalization, conventionally considered as spanning the years from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II, is one of the least studied by economists. The problem, from the economists’ point of view, is that it is a political period par excellence. The October Revolution in 1917 “subtracted” from under the capitalist control one of the key countries in the world with the largest landmass.

…

Vignette 1.10 - Two Students of Inequality: Vilfredo Pareto and Simon Kuznets
CHAPTER 2
Vignette 2.1 - Why Was Marx Led Astray?
Vignette 2.2 - How Unequal Is Today’s World?
Vignette 2.3 - How Much of Your Income Is Determined at Birth?
Vignette 2.4 - Should the Whole World Be Composed of Gated Communities?
Vignette 2.5 - Who Are the Harraga?
Vignette 2.6 - The Three Generations of Obamas
Vignette 2.7 - Did the World Become More Unequal During Deglobalization?
CHAPTER 3
Vignette 3.1 - Where in the Global Income Distribution Are YOU?
Vignette 3.2 - Does the World Have a Middle Class?
Vignette 3.3 - How Different Are the United States and the European Union?
Vignette 3.4 - Why Are Asia and Latin America Mirror Images of Each Other?
Vignette 3.5 - Do You Want to Know the Winner Before the Game Begins?
Vignette 3.6 - Income Inequality and the Global Financial Crisis
Vignette 3.7 - Did Colonizers Exploit as Much as They Could?

…

She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now learned ... the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere [outside of Indonesia].6
Vignette 2.7
Did the World Become More Unequal During Deglobalization?
One of the truisms of simple neoclassical economics is that openness to the movement of labor, capital, and goods—that is, globalization—should not only benefit all participating countries but benefit more the poor ones.1 This is based essentially on three assumptions. First, poor countries are “producing” a higher marginal return to each successive addition of capital than the rich countries.

If things do not change, says the OECD, it is realistic to expect stagnation in the West, a slowing pace of growth in emerging markets and the likely bankruptcy of many states.
So what’s more likely is that at some point one or more countries will quit globalization, via protectionism, debt write-offs and currency manipulation. Or that a de-globalization crisis originating in diplomatic and military conflict spills over into the world economy and produces the same results.
The lesson from the OECD’s report is that we need a complete system redesign. The most highly educated generation in the history of the human race, and the best connected, will not accept a future of high inequality and stagnant growth.
Instead of a chaotic race to de-globalize the world, and decades of stagnation combined with rising inequality, we need a new economic model. To design it will involve more than an effort of utopian thinking. Keynes’s genius in the mid-1930s was to understand what the crisis had revealed about the existing system: that a workable new model would have to be built around the permanent inefficiencies of the old one, which mainstream economics could not see.

…

In January 2014, John Ashton, a career diplomat and formerly the British government’s special representative on climate change, delivered the blunt truth to the 1 per cent: ‘The market left to itself will not reconfigure the energy system and transform the economy within a generation.’3
According to the International Energy Agency, even if all the announced emissions-reduction plans, all the carbon taxes and all the renewables targets are achieved – that is, if consumers don’t revolt against higher taxes, and the world does not de-globalize – then CO2 emissions will still rise by 20 per cent by 2035. Instead of limiting the warming of the earth to only a two-degree increase, the temperature will rise 3.6 degrees.4
Faced with a clear warning that a 4.5-billion-year-old planet is being destabilized, those in power decided that a 25-year-old economic doctrine held the solution. They resolved to incentivize lower carbon use by rationing it, taxing it and subsidizing the alternatives.

…

These are, as we saw in chapter 9, projected to become stratospheric as a result of ageing populations. Over time, there is a danger that austerity plus stagnation will shrink the size of the economies from which the debts have to be repaid.
Therefore governments have to do something clear and progressive about debts. They could be written off unilaterally – and in countries like Greece, where they are unpayable, that might be required. But the outcome would be de-globalization, as countries and investors holding the worthless debt retaliated, cutting off market access or kicking the defaulting countries out of various currency and trading zones.
Some of the quantitative easing money could be used to buy and bury the debts – but even this so-called ‘monetization’ of debt, using the $12 trillion created so far, would not reduce global sovereign debts enough compared to GDP as these stand at $54 trillion and rising, and the global stock of all debts is approaching $300 trillion.

The prospect of surprisingly high climate sensitivity does, however,
add marginally to the downside of boosting fossil-fuel emissions. Yet
natural gas, for the time being, is lowering emissions because it’s displacing coal. Rising U.S. oil production, meanwhile, will be offset substantially by lower oil production elsewhere, and it remains relatively
small in the context of global emissions.
T
he big wild cards facing the future of U.S. energy—peak oil, major
war, deglobalization, a stalled economic recovery, and surprisingly
high climate sensitivity—all have something in common: they largely
reinforce the benefits of the changes currently sweeping the American
energy scene. There are modest exceptions, like somewhat greater climate risks from new oil production if climate sensitivity turns out to
be surprisingly large, and bigger economic risks from some new environmental rules meant to foster efficiency and alternatives if economic
growth continues to falter.

The economist and historian Jeffrey Williamson, as well as many of his colleagues,
distinguish a first ‘wave’ of globalisation, which they place between 1870 and
1913 and refer to as the ‘age of mass migration’. In contrast, the second ‘wave’
of globalisation would have started in the 1950s and continues to the present.
From their point of view, the intervening period (1913–45) would be one of
de-globalisation. See for example Williamson (1996).
28. According to Rodrik (2007b: 8), with a 3 per cent increase in their share of the
labour force of rich countries, immigrants from the South would enjoy net gains
of $265 billion per year. This is considerably higher than gain estimates as part of
the Doha round of negotiations ($30 billion according to Rodrik).
29. Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden are the five
countries that reached this target of 0.7 per cent of their Gross National Income
in 2009 (United Nations, 2010).
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28/11/2013 13:04
notes
Conclusion
1.

The half-century
preceding 1914 had witnessed a globalised world with free movement of capital
and labour and Gold Standard which meant that except for Great Britain, no other
country had monetary sovereignty. Over the period, the cycles in 1864–1914
became more interlinked across the developed countries of the globe and there
was a rough regularity about their frequency. In the 1919–39 period the world
deglobalised. The free movement of labour came to a stop and the movements of
capital became difficult across national barriers. Great Britain lost its hegemony
of the world economy and the USA was not yet ready to take it up. The cycles
became irregular and uncorrelated. There was an upswing and inflation in the
immediate postwar period but by 1922/23 the deflationary phase began in major
European economies.

Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999); see also the Afterword to the paperback edition of Harvey , The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
19. Cited in Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 168–70.
20. S. Amin, ‘Social Movements at the Periphery’, in Wignaraja (ed.), New Social Movements in the South, 76–100.
21. W. Bello, Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (London: Zed Books, 2002); Bello, Bullard, and Malhotra (eds.), Global Finance; S. George , Another World is Possible IF… (London: Verso, 2003); W. Fisher and T. Ponniah (eds.), Another World is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum (London: Zed Books, 2003); P. Bond, Talk Left Walk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2004); Mertes, A Movement of Movements; Gill, Teetering on the Rim; Brecher, Costello, and Smith, Globalization from Below.
22.

This is because financial markets are more integrated and the autonomy of national policy is more limited than elsewhere.10 In practice, the outcome in Europe is likely to be some mixture of the two. The same is also true for the world as a whole, where tension arises between a desire to agree at least a minimum level of common regulatory standards and a parallel desire to preserve domestic regulatory autonomy.11 Such pressure for ‘de-globalization’ may not be limited to finance. The combination of slow growth with widening inequality, higher unemployment, financial instability, so-called ‘currency wars’ and fiscal defaults may yet undermine the political legitimacy of globalization in many other respects.
Inevitably, the legacy of the crises includes large-scale institutional changes in many areas of policy, at national, regional and global levels.

…

Taylor, ‘Financial Crises, Credit Booms and External Imbalances’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 16567, December 2010, www.nber.org, and Alan M. Taylor, ‘The Great Leveraging’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 18290, August 2012, www.nber.org.
10. Adair Turner, ‘Financial Risk and Regulation: Do we Need More Europe or Less?’, 27 April 2012, Financial Services Authority, http://www.fsa.gov.uk/library/communication/speeches/2012/0427-at.shtml.
11. Another example of ‘de-globalization’ is the proposed ring-fencing of domestic retail banking from global investment banking proposed by the UK’s Independent Commission on Banking, of which I was a member. This was set up by the incoming coalition government under the chairmanship of Sir John Vickers. See Independent Commission on Banking, Final Report: Recommendations, September 2011, London, http://bankingcommission.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ICB-Final-Report.pdf, ch. 3.

Then came the collapse of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha round of negotiations in 2006, when it was argued that without an agreement on a single overarching global framework of rules, global trade would unwind, retrench, or contract. And most recently with the financial crisis of 2007–8, exports slumped, international lending diminished, and the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism came under attack, all cited as evidence of “de-globalization.” A fourth front of “end of globalization” hyperbole is now under way as American interest rates rise, Chinese growth slows, and cheap energy and advanced manufacturing technologies together enable the near-shoring and automation of production.
But I argue that globalization is entering a new golden age. Driven by the confluence of strategic ambitions, new technologies, cheap money, and global migration, globalization continues to widen and deepen in almost every conceivable dimension.

…

American multinationals have added over two million jobs across Asia and Latin America and cut nearly one million jobs at home, but they have also created many new high-skill jobs domestically in engineering, consulting, and finance.*1 Furthermore, the more jobs and wealth American companies create abroad, the more foreigners buy American goods: U.S. exports to emerging markets doubled from 1990 to 2012. Cutting off American investment (and thus profits) overseas will therefore lead to reduced investment at home too. Remember tug-of-war: Be careful when untangling the rope.
Even what looks like de-globalization is actually still globalization. Apple is a perfect example of these complex realities. The Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti estimates that Apple is substantially responsible for sixty thousand jobs in Silicon Valley, only twelve thousand of which are employees in its Cupertino headquarters. “In Silicon Valley,” Moretti claims, “high-tech jobs are the cause of local prosperity, and the doctors, lawyers, roofers and yoga teachers are the effect.”2 What appears a thriving community is primarily the result of corporate innovation and global growth—not public investment.

If the question itself is simple, the answer is anything
but, primarily because it involves the interplay between the
global economy as a whole and individual national economies, particularly those of rich countries. For example, if
we believe that the increase in national inequalities is due
above all to the globalization of trade, it would be tempting
Policies for a Fairer Globalization 147
to try to remedy it by taking protectionist measures. Several figures in France and elsewhere in the world have come
out in favor of this policy. Some have even advocated a
policy of “de-­globalization.”1 The problem is that even if
such a policy did lead to a reduction in inequalities in some
countries—which, as we will see later on, is itself doubtful—it would also be a hindrance to the development of
other countries and would ultimately slow down the reduction of poverty in the world. This is exactly the kind of
trade-­off that a community that cares about global well-­
being must avoid.

Certainly we need to raise the incomes of the poorest in the rich countries and support growth in poor countries, but if we want to stand any chance of stopping global warming, rich countries have to consume less, starting with the richest – the least green of all. Hence the necessity of contraction and convergence.
We are told by politicians that globalisation is the future – ever-increasing integration of different economies, more imports and exports, more travel, both freight and passenger. The total distance travelled by all the parts in a computer or car may be equivalent to the distance from the earth to the moon. The politicians are wrong: de-globalisation is necessary for a sustainable future. Unless and until we can devise low-carbon forms of travel, which means, in effect, an alternative to petroleum-based fuel, there will have to be much less of it, and much more local production. And in more localised economies we are much less likely to harm the environment because any damage and waste are less likely to be out of sight and mind.
A new geography
Cutting back on travel – both freight and passenger, including commuting – would change the geography of our societies, both within and between countries.

One reason why unemployment did not rise as sharply in the recession as in previous downturns was the public sector. In the three months to October 2009, for example, an extra 23,000 NHS jobs pushed up employment opportunities, in many cases for women. Another academic study, looking at Dundee – the jam and jute city once famously dependent on international trade – remarked that with four out of ten jobs in the public sector, the city had been ‘de-globalized’, making its regional economy both less open and more stable.
Labour’s trick was to detach living standards from incomes. During stable, low-inflationary growth, people readily took on more debt while running down their savings. When nearly seven out of ten households owned their own homes, property inflation created a widespread sense of being better off, with added ease of borrowing. The wealth illusion depended on the banks lending on higher multiples of income to finance consumption.

I can’t say I was surprised when the bank’s lawyers sent down word four months later that permission would be denied. Economists at big banks do publish books, but most often the subject matter is along the lines of how your retirement savings can outperform the stock market. Mine was about how triple-digit oil prices were going to reverse globalization. CIBC doesn’t sell oil, and it sure doesn’t sell de-globalization.
Looking back, I realize that McCaughey was only doing his job, which was to protect the bank’s interests. But I didn’t write the book so that it wouldn’t get read. I’d been preaching its themes to whoever would listen at CIBC for years. It was time to take the message to a broader audience.
By the time I stepped away from the job, CIBC had much bigger things to worry about than my literary ambitions.

For a discussion of the rise of urban neoliberalism in the United States,
see Alice O’Conner, “The Privatized City: The Manhattan Institute, the Urban Crisis,
and the Conservative Counterrevolution in New York,” Journal of Urban History 34,
no. 2 (January 2008): 333–53; Jamie Peck, “Liberating the City: Between New York
and New Orleans, Urban Geography 27, no. 8 (2006): 681–713.
23.â•¯Walden Bello, Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (London:
Zed Books, 2005).
24.â•¯Bryn Hughes, “The ‘Fundamental’ Threat of (Neo)Liberal Democracy: An
Unlikely Source of Legitimation for Political Violence, Dialogue 3, no. 2 (2005):
43–85. http://www.polsis.uq.edu.au/dialogue/3-2-4.pdf (accessed November 11,
2010); Leys, Market Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and the Public Interest;
Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in
Dubious Times (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
25.â•¯Walden Bello, “The Post-Washington Consensus: The Unraveling of
a Doctrine of Development” (Focus on the Global South, October 18, 2008).
http://focusweb.org/the-post-washington-dissensus.html?

Regardless of that, ordinary voters will demand it in the future and
opportunistic politicians will pledge to deliver it. Obvious implications will include a focus on green and community issues and various promises of free time and family-friendly policies. Of course,
this trend could go out of the window the moment there’s a flu pandemic, major war or economic downturn.
Global or national?
Another wildcard is globalization, or perhaps more accurately
de-globalization. While most people assume that globalization is
here to stay, I’d argue that this is far from certain. Globalization
will probably last for at least another decade or two but there are
a number of worrying signs. First, the rise of China and India
could result in economic protectionism in regions like the US
and Europe, putting a few speed-bumps in the road to further
globalization. It’s interesting to note that in 1990 there were 50
regional trade agreements around the world but by 2005 there
were 250.

But as these countries move back toward full employment, the rebalancing of global growth will make them more prone to inflation than they were in the precrisis years. From this point of view, the sooner the world economy can be rebalanced, eliminating excessive trade surpluses and deficits worldwide, the smaller the risk of dangerous inflationary pressures. Unfortunately, as discussed previously in this chapter, the prospects of such a global rebalancing occurring quickly and smoothly do not seem bright. Protectionism and deglobalization therefore could create the conditions for stagflation to return.
Big Government
From the mid-1960s until the late 1970s, the world experienced a large upsurge of government spending and employment. This was clearly one of the major causes of stagflation. Whatever one’s political outlook about the virtues or vices of public spending, there can be no denying that government-administered activities are generally insensitive to competition.

It is even conceivable that well-meaning carbon-reduction policies, by penalizing emissions by different amounts in different countries, could trigger tariff wars if countries respond by imposing border taxes to recoup their losses.515
A second possibility is the rising cost of oil. Global trade is fueled by cheap energy, and container ships and long-haul cargo trucks cannot readily be electrified like passenger cars as described in Chapter 3. And as environmental damages, too, are increasingly priced into production costs in manufacturing countries like China, the apparent profit margin of a global versus local trade network will narrow.
A deglobalized world with extremely high energy prices might be an oddly familiar one, with local farmers feeding compact walking cities, a return to domestic manufacturing, and airplane travel afforded only by rich elites. One could even imagine a reversal of the urbanization trend as farming returns to being a labor-intensive industry, no longer propped by cheap hydrocarbon for fuel, fertilizers, and pesticides.

On 19 October 1921, for example, the Chinese government declared bankruptcy, and proceeded to default on nearly all China’s external debts. It was a story repeated all over the world, from Shanghai to Santiago, from Moscow to Mexico City. By the end of the 1930s, most states in the world, including those that retained political freedoms, had imposed restrictions on trade, migration and investment as a matter of course. Some achieved near-total economic self-sufficiency (autarky), the ideal of a de-globalized society. Consciously or unconsciously, all governments applied in peacetime the economic restrictions that had first been imposed between 1914 and 1918.
The origins of the First World War became clearly visible - as soon as it had broken out. Only then did the Bolshevik leader Lenin see that war was an inevitable consequence of imperialist rivalries. Only then did American liberals grasp that secret diplomacy and the tangle of European alliances were the principal causes of conflict.

If there is nothing in supranational ‘Europe’ that could provide for the sort of social cohesion and solidarity and governability that would be required, of the kind that was over two centuries more or less successfully established in European nation states – if all there is at supranational level are the Junckers and Draghis and their fellow financial functionaries – then the general answer is that rather than, like latter-day Don Quixotes, trying to extend the scale of democracy to that of capitalist markets, to do what you can to reduce the scale of the latter to fit the former. Bringing capitalism back into the ambit of democratic government, and thereby saving the latter from extinction, means de-globalizing capitalism; it is as simple and as difficult as that. There is no denying that this would be a huge agenda, and in certain respects, perhaps, also a costly one, with no guarantee of success. But it would at least be a goal worth fighting for. Restoring embedded democracy means re-embedding capitalism. In this context, thinking about a monetary regime less destructive of democracy than the pitiful monstrosity that is EMU would be a task that would justify the sweat of the best and brightest.

But governments and rulers also had to agree to permit free(ish) trade – or any trade at all. Politics and geopolitics were a vital part of the equation. The outbreak of wars and their unpredictable course could shatter one equilibrium and impose another. Thus the great expansion of trade in the late nineteenth century and the kinds of globalization it helped to promote came to a shuddering halt with the First World War. After 1929, ‘deglobalization’ set in with catastrophic results. Europe’s original breakthrough to a position of primacy in its global relations is much better seen as the unexpected result of a revolution in Eurasia than as the outcome of a steady advance in Columbus’s footsteps. The appropriate imagery is not of rivers or tides, but of earthquakes and floods.
The second assumption is that we must set Europe’s age of expansion firmly in its Eurasian context.

Source: Haver Analytics.
27.3 THE NEXT 20 YEARS
The shadow of the crisis
Many of the trends listed above contributed to the 2007–2008 financial crisis; and their reversals are, in part, consequences of the crisis. In this spirit, PIMCO’s Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian characterize the post-crisis years as the “new normal” environment of slower economic growth and greater government involvement, in which de-leveraging, de-globalization, and re-regulation are key features.
Like many others, I expected the crisis to have a long-lasting impact on this generation’s risk appetite—echoing that of the conservative “depression babies”—but the sharp risky asset rally in 2009 and early 2010 suggests that the lessons were not very memorable. The mother of all stimulus efforts succeeded in reviving animal spirits in 2009. Asset reflation was the key policy for pulling the economy back from the edge of the precipice.

For their part, Schmidt and Cohen also warn against “Internet balkanization” whereby authoritarian state actors (China, Russia, Iran, federations of Sunni states, Texas, and so on) build virtual borders around their citizens, keeping them trapped in a closed bubble of sanctioned concepts, and sheltered from the enlightening waters of the global Internet provided by open platforms, such as Google. Under this deglobalization, the cosmopolitan potential of the Google Cloud model would be subverted and inverted by local “traditional states” jealous of their citizens’ wandering attention. They explain the dynamic of Cloud versus state in the gentlest possible terms for a Western audience. The negative scenarios drawn include alternative DNS (Domain Name System) addressing systems allowing any state bloc to contain its own map of the online world, separate from others, and in principle to wipe other locations off their particular map.